Registration & Networking
- Collect your badge and settle in before the first workshop round.
- Connect with the combined Converge and CEM Africa audience.
Converge Retail Tech brings Johannesburg’s retail and digital commerce leaders together for one focused working day to solve live challenges, benchmark what’s working and identify the technology and partners that can move your business forward.
Choose your path through eight practical, 60-minute workshops covering the challenges shaping retail and digital commerce. Each session is designed for discussion, problem-solving and practical application — not passive listening.
Across the day, you will:
✓ Work through real business challenges with retail peers and specialists
✓ Benchmark strategies and technology choices with senior decision-makers
✓ Meet relevant solution partners through curated meeting introductions
✓ Build practical next steps you can take back to your team
✓ Access CEM Africa Johannesburg Edition alongside the Retail Tech programme
Two communities. Two agendas. One ticket.
Move between Retail Tech and CEM Africa content throughout the day, expanding the conversations, perspectives and connections available to you.
You leave with clearer priorities, new approaches and the right conversations already started.
Whatever seat you hold, this day was built looking at your to-do list.
Acquisition costs keep climbing, marketplaces are squeezing margin, and the board wants growth anyway. Take home practical plays on conversion, retail media revenue, and trading on and against Takealot, Amazon, Shein and Temu.
Your customers do not think in channels, but your systems still do. Leave with real approaches to unified commerce, connected stores and a single view of stock, customer and order.
Batch-and-blast is dead and your CFO knows it. Dig into customer data platforms, AI-driven personalisation across web, app, email and WhatsApp, and how retailers are monetising their own audiences.
Sixty60 taught your customers what delivery should feel like, and now that is your benchmark. Work through last mile, dark stores, click and collect, township logistics and returns that do not bleed margin.
Every vendor promises AI. This day shows you where it is actually working in South African retail: demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, range planning and loss prevention, presented by peers and practitioners you can interrogate.
The store is not dying, it is being rewired. See what modern POS, endless aisle and in-store digital look like when they earn their keep on the shop floor.
Five workshop rounds run inside CEM Africa Johannesburg's session slots, with structured matchmaking and shared networking throughout. Choose one room in each round.
The New Rules of How Consumers Discover, Shop & Belong
How do we turn our shopper data and digital real estate into a revenue line?
One Customer, One Stock Pool, One Connected Experience
Where Will the Next Retail Sale Come From?
Can Retail Actually Deliver on the Customer Promise?
From Retail Hype to Measurable Results
From Transaction to Lifetime Value
Your Converge pass includes full access to CEM Africa Johannesburg's CX programme across all sessions of workshops and panels on trust, service and the business of experience.
Own your category conversation before your competitors do
Every element of sponsorship is structured to generate direct commercial interaction with senior retail buyers. Workshops, guaranteed introductions, concierge facilitation and lead capture are built in, not bolt-ons.
A curated room of 150 to 250 retail, ecommerce and omnichannel decision-makers, drawn from the Converge Africa community and a dedicated Gauteng retail data build. Vetted, senior and actively evaluating solutions. This audience does not exist in a LinkedIn search.
Co-location with CEM Africa Johannesburg puts roughly 400 senior CX decision-makers on the same floor across two days. Your workshop works the focused retail room; your pod and your team work the combined audience.
Sandton is the financial centre of the continent. The retail groups headquartered and operationally anchored in Gauteng represent the highest concentration of retail technology investment in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This is the first Johannesburg edition of Converge Retail Tech, ahead of the full Converge Retail Tech launch in Cape Town in 2027. CEM Africa proved the roadshow-to-flagship trajectory in this exact venue in three years. Sponsors who commit now hold the most prominent positions as the event grows.
Your sponsorship works before, during and after the event: pre-event campaigns, workshop promotion, onsite branding, post-event content, branded insights emails and a 12-month Vuka Industry Hub listing.
Converge Africa 2026 in Cape Town brought together Africa’s digital commerce ecosystem for three days of insight, connection and opportunity. From inspiring keynote sessions and expert-led panel discussions to a dynamic exhibition floor, Startup Pavilion and pitch stage, the event spotlighted the trends, technologies and partnerships shaping the future of digital commerce.
2026 at a Glance
A team attends four rounds across two rooms and comes back with coverage: eight topics, compared perspectives, and a shared reference point for every trading, technology and fulfilment debate you will have next year. That is why team pricing is deliberately accessible.
Package includes:
Optional add on:
Package includes:
Optional add on:
Package includes:
Optional add on:
Converge Africa is a part of a series of retail events unlike any other. It's the new unifying brand for the digital commerce value chain. Formerly ECOM Africa.
Converge Africa Conference & Expo
For enquiries contact:
T: +27 21 700 3500
T: +27 21 700 3579
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